Now that Sitemeter is tracking visitors to this blog, I can see that my readers live all over the US and France, plus Canada, Austria, Germany, England, Japan, Italy, Taiwan, Singapore, Australia, Peru, Brazil, and more. I can't tell you how exciting this feels! Now that I know that more than just a handful of friends and colleagues and online acquaintances are reading my blog, I'd like to invite y'all to introduce yourselves, tell us where you're from, what your connection to this topic is, and/or what you'd like to see more of on the blog. (You don't even have to register for a Blogger account--just sign in as "anonymous.") I'll take your wishes and interests into account, I promise. (I'm a teacher, so I'm used to getting evaluations and suggestions from my students, so it seems only natural to want feedback from my readers!)
Please? S'il vous plait?
Hello!
ReplyDeleteI'm a hopelessly monolingual guy who's been lurking and watching in fascination as you do all this incredible research! Pretty impressive if I do say so myself.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteHi Sarah.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was traveling in Ireland, there were many foreign college students who were spending time there in order to improve their English. Why? To get a better job. Several of them wanted to be flight attendants.
I speak Spanish fairly fluently, and have always been grateful for that. The earlier we learn, the better!
Good luck!
Hi. This is Estela. I think I am one of your oldest, albeit intermittent, readers. I grew up bilingual (English & Spanish) with bilingual parents (mom talked to me almost exclusively in Spanish and dad almost exclusively in English) and attended a predominently English-speaking school in Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico. I now have a baby who I plan to raise bilingually (with a basically monolingual dad), so I come here for ideas and encouragement. Hopefully at some point I will contribute my own experiences, but so far all I can say is that she rolls her "r"s well. ;)
ReplyDeleteAnonymous--Thank you for the compliments! Fortunately, the research is great fun.
ReplyDeleteJoe--Thanks for the support! Your blog on Information and Communications Technology and language teaching is extremely impressive. Readers who are interested in that aspect of language teaching, check it out!
Stacy--Welcome back from Ireland! Isn't it good to get out of the country and hear other languages and accents and experience other cultures? That's one thing I try to inspire in my students.
Estela--Good to hear from you again! In a few months I'll probably be asking to profile your daughter as an infant language learner.
Smashedpea--Welcome! Would you consider letting me profile Sophie? Or at least do a couple of posts on your blog about how and why you're teaching her German?
Hi Sarah,
ReplyDeleteFascinating blog and I totally agree with what you're doing. I will watch with interest as an 18 month old male relative of mine is about to move to Paris and be brought up bilingually by his bilingual French/English mother and English Dad.
Polly
Hi Sarah,
ReplyDeleteYour blog is wonderful, filled with great information and fun stuff. I think you're serving and inspiring a lot of people with this information. I'm forwarding your blog address to a friend of mine in Austria. She's American, her husband Austrian, and her children bilingual. I think she'll enjoy the blog and even have some comments for you. She currently teaches ESL privately. She lives in Graz, Austria and is a dear friend.
All best, keep up the great blog! Gaea
Hi Sarah, it's me again, Gaea. I have a suggestion, that your comments be posted with most recent first, and the older one below it. Just intuitively that feels like a better way to view the posts. Although, I see that there are no dates on the posts, so maybe it doesn't matter. Okay, you can delete this if you want!
ReplyDeleteGaea
Hello everyone,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see so many links and resources about an interesting topic.
Lori
Hello! I've just discovered your blog and really need to read it some more! But for now, I'll introduce myself. I'm an English teacher, but I majored in French in college, and I now live in Japan. Needless to say, we want to introduce our daughter to different languages! Let's share experiences!
ReplyDeletePolly--Keep me updated about the bilingual baby in Paris! (Readers: Polly and I met when we were teaching English in France ten years ago!)
ReplyDeleteGaea--Thanks for writing! I don't know how to control how comments appear--does anyone else know?
Lori--Good to hear from you too! (Readers: Lori teaches English in Japan and we'll be seeing a profile of her daughter soon!)
Mary--Welcome! It's great to have multicultural readers like you. Keep us updated about your daughter, too!
Hi!
ReplyDeleteMy name is Kelly and I currently live in Lexington, KY. I am a frined of Sara's from Colorado. I do not speak another language, but my husband speaks Spanish--we would like to raise our (future) children speaking Spanish from the start.
Thanks for all of the great ideas, Sarah!
Kelly
Hi all,
ReplyDeleteI'm John a newbie on this blog. Originally I'm from Leicester in England, but moved to France back in 1997 to live with my French girlfriend Isabelle.
We live about 40km south of Paris in a small village in the Essonne region.
After 9 years in France I can speak French quite well and Isabelle can speak English better than I can speak French!
No kids just yet, but we are planning on starting a family, so being the "foreigner" in this household I am very interested in reading the various articles on this blog.
Presently, at home, we speak mostly in French. So the main problem for me now is to buck the trend and speak English. Isabelle often moans at me that I should practice English with her, but I'm afraid that I am ashamed of the British reputation of not making much of an effort when it comes to speaking foreign languages. I suppose this to prove to other French people, that I can integrate into French life, but that is far from easy.
Now it's time for me to back pedal for a bit and speak more English at home.
Keep up the good work on this blog - it's a great reference point for couples like myself and Isabelle.
Thanks, Kelly and John! Good to see you both again here.
ReplyDeleteGeography update! In the past week, people have come to the blog from the following countries: Hungary, Scotland, Sweden, Venezuela, Thailand, Korea, Palau, and Switzerland (plus some of the countries mentioned in my original post). Wouldn't it be cool if eventually I had visitors from every country in the world?
Hi - I've visited your blog before but I'll introduce myself now. I'm Canadian but having been living in Germany with my German husband since 1990. We have raised our two sons, now 10 and 13, bilingually from birth. I am also an ESL teacher/tutor.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting blog you have here.
Hi Christina! I've visited your blog too and admired your recipes and your long list of expat blogs (which I am slowly working my way through). Let me know if you'd be interested in letting me profile your bilingual kids!
ReplyDeleteCountry update: In the past week, we've also had visitors from Iran, Bangladesh, Poland, the Phillipines, Vietnam, Greece, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Denmark.
I just realized that this post would be better here....
ReplyDeleteHere is my problem. My baby is about 3 months old, and I am the only one who speaks Spanish. I am not a native speaker, but I teach Spanish at a local high school in Colorado. My husband can swear (complements of me) in Spanish and can understand some, but doesn't seem horribly interested in learning tons. Then again I haven't asked him flat out yet. He does seem interested in teaching Tucker sign language starting in a few months. Right now I am on materninty leave but will be going back in January. At that point my mother who has even less experience with Spanish will be his main caretaker. She still can't even pronounce the word jalepeno correctly (for the purists, I just don't remember how to put the n with the squiggly in from a laptop and for me it is really late- please forgive me this one time)I feel that it is something important that I should do for my son, but teaching him Spanish is a daunting task. I don't want to isolate him at all from my husband or my mother, or anyone else around us, (my inlaws also know no Spanish except for a few choice words I'd rather Tucker not know for a good long time) but I've read some of the research that this is the perfect time to introduce it. I already sing songs to him in Spanish, but would really welcome other suggestions. Especially from non-native speakers trying to teach their children their second (or fifth) language being surrounded by your first language.
enough babble for the night
-Cynde
Hi Sarah,
ReplyDeleteOccasionally a Nicaraguan American kid shows up in my town (usually from Miami). They've spent time in the US public school system (primary) and speak English, but they speak it with an accent and make lots of errors. Although they make errors, the words come out with enough slang or familiarity to show they picked up a native flow to their speach (on the playground?). Also, when they speak Spanish they have an accent, but it doesn't sound American, and they make grammatical mistakes too. If you want, there is a 5th grader I could film speaking both English & Spanish (moved back a couple months ago). Interestingly, he doesn't seem to fit into his new culture, but he uses his English to show off at every opportunity in front of his peers, who are very much in awe.
Celine Perchellet
Hi Cynde and Celine--thanks for visiting! I turned Cynde's comment into its own post because she raises a lot of questions relevant to many of us. And Celine is a French-American friend I met when studying abroad in France; she's now a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua. I'd love to hear more about bilingualism there. Would you like to be a guest author and write something I can post? (I wish I knew how to add video, because the child you mention sounds very interesting!)
ReplyDeleteGeography update: as of Nov. 1, people from Norway, Spain, Ireland, Honduras, Nicaragua, and New Zealand have visited this blog too!
ReplyDeleteGeography update! As of Nov. 26, we've also had visitors from Estonia, Belgium, Romania, the Netherlands, Italy, Qatar, Libya, India, Argentina, Moldova, Sweden, and Morocco. This means that people on five continents have seen my blog! (Six, if New Zealand can "count" for Australia.)
ReplyDeleteBermuda yurtdışı kargo
ReplyDeleteBonaire yurtdışı kargo
Bolivya yurtdışı kargo
Birleşik Arap Emirlikleri yurtdışı kargo
Bhutanya yurtdışı kargo
QSP54